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A number of years ago, I was the recipient of an “inadvertent disclosure”. I was the only one in the meeting not cleared for the info, and I still remember the looks on the faces of the others when the guy said what he said. The security group shortly came to me with an agreement not to divulge, which I was fine with signing.
Now confess how pleased (and relieved) you were, with the more civilized version of “being silenced”...
 
This is a Fake Video. AP in it’s current state cannot leave its lane, even for crash avoidance.
Very irresponsible of you to post something like this.
Tesla fanboys are really getting crazier by the day and I say that as a Tesla driver.
I dont know if it is fake or not, but if you say it is fake, I guess you can show some evidence.
 
That is a ridiculous statement. Tesla, in Q4, made only $330M on nearly $9B revenue. That’s a tiny profit margin. Apple, in that quarter, made around $13B profit on $64B revenue.

To catch up, Tesla would need quarterly revenue of around $400B. That would mean they would need to sell about as much as the top five automakers combined, every quarter. Good luck with that.
Tesla profits is very much eroded by significant expenditures due to expansion and R&D. Not all investment costs can be capitalized which means that we are seeing very small profit at the end of each quarter. Tesla is basically a start up and you are comparing it to fully mature corporation as Apple.
 
I am sorry to break it to you but there will be no Apple car. Apple left it too late and are too far behind. I say this as a huge Apple fan.
Sorry, Apple is not "too late" and is not "too far behind". Besides, too late and behind whom? It's not a race, it's just a competition, and Apple could leapfrog everyone else upon introduction. New cars come into the market all the time. They sell or don't sell based on their marketing skills and features/quality/price.
 
Apple making cars sounds as good as CNN building submarines.
Making a car OS that car manufacturers can implement sound more in their way of things.
 
Apple won't build any cars
They supply the tech & possibly some components to current manufacturers

There will be, instead, some sort of a subscription service involved that does not involve individuals purchasing or leasing the vehicles

Won't need to fuss with parking or storing it in your driveway or garage - the car comes to you as needed and goes away when not needed
 
I am sorry to break it to you but there will be no Apple car. Apple left it too late and are too far behind. I say this as a huge Apple fan.
Sorry, Apple is not "too late" and is not "too far behind". Besides, too late and behind whom? It's not a race, it's just a competition, and Apple could leapfrog everyone else upon introduction. New cars come into the market all the time. They sell or don't sell based on their marketing skills and features/quality/price.

Secondly, Cmaier is correct and you are wrong. Most of the contract component suppliers are perfectly able to scale up production. And it's much less of an issue when buying off-the-shelf components/assemblies, especially when you know you're going to get paid by Apple. Somehow certain companies get priority.
 
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Where have they been building and testing this mysterious car? Is there a race track and factory deep beneath Apple Park?
Well, Apple has a large office/warehouse complex they set up for Project Titan. And they bought a rural test track that was unused by one of the big 3 several years ago. Further, you can build a car from scratch in a suitably-sized and equipped garage (do you not watch any of the car shows on TV?). My brother and I many years ago did a bunch of fiberglass work in our garage in our attempt to turn a VW Beetle into a taller VW Karmann Ghia (approximately). I won't do any glass work ever again, but many things are doable. Load the vehicle onto a truck, drive over to the track at night, and go. There are also several race tracks that would probably allow Apple the privacy they crave for testing. All in all, not an issue.
 
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Apple making cars sounds as good as CNN building submarines.
Making a car OS that car manufacturers can implement sound more in their way of things.

Not sure about them wanting partners. They have an interest in controlling as much of the product as possible and don’t usually co-market others for their own efforts.
 
Tesla profits is very much eroded by significant expenditures due to expansion and R&D. Not all investment costs can be capitalized which means that we are seeing very small profit at the end of each quarter. Tesla is basically a start up and you are comparing it to fully mature corporation as Apple.

I didn’t make the comparison. I was responding to the ludicrous comparison. And, btw, Tesla needs to continuously recapitalize and retool, so it’s not like these were one-time expenditures.
 
Yep. Like I said, it'll be another 50-100 years before fully autonomous cars.

It's the opposite of what you said. Progress is measured in a logarithmic scale. The more time advances, the less progress advances. Notice that even Moore's Law - a scale measuring semiconductor progress - has slowed down.

meant to say curve, not scale.

Opposite? Where did I say we're on a linear curve?
 
That'll be interesting...being drunk in a self-driving car! Will that be legal at some point when self-driving cars are fully autonomous (no needing to babysit the car)?
I'm going to say that it'll probably never be legal to be intoxicated in a fully autonomous vehicle. Laws will likely still require operators to be in control of the vehicle in case of a system failure. Modern airplanes have excellent autopilot systems and the system maintenance, reliability and redundancy they require is way above any consumer product. Those systems still fail from time to time forcing pilots to manually fly the plane. No system is 100% reliable. You will still need to be in control of you autonomous vehicle at all times. With that said, however there will probably be a lot less people getting caught drinking and driving in an autonomous vehicle than in a manually driven one.
 
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I think the bigger news here is the fact that Tim Cook declined a meeting with Elon Musk. That's shortsighted even if Apple wasn't interested in buying Tesla. I'm a TC fan but this concerns me with the judgement decision. A few hours of your time to at least pick Elon Musk's brain to see how he ticks? Big miss. He has actually put humans in space. So...


More on topic. Ordered the Tesla truck over a year ago. Still haven't a clue when it will be released. So this news is just par for the course. But the future of cars/trucks looks good from here. We'll see.
Although you are probably right. It does also make you think that maybe they have a lot of confidence in what they are working on right now. So hopefully we will see a good competitor. Some people have mentioned the fact that Apple will be lagging on the AI involved with driving. I'm don't really know about that. But what I do know is that the new chips may play a big part in this. The computational power needed to analyze all of the sensors in real-time has to be a hurdle for anybody in this sector. Apple has a leg up in this department.
 
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I don't have enough experience with EV to see the hidden (or even obvious) opportunities. Those that do... What are those opportunities? Apple tends to shine brightest when they enter an established market and redefine. What is missing or backward about today's EV market that Apple could come in and grab a serious chunk?
 
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It doesn’t take an hour to recharge these things, first of all. Second, how many trips are > 300 miles? I’ve owned a model S since 2013, and in that time I only had to stop at a supercharger once. And it took 30 minutes (during which time i got a drink and read the news at the mall where the charger was located.)

And out here, the mass public is certainly buying Teslas. They are literally everywhere. Any parking lot has more than one.
Bingo. Very few trips will be more than 300 miles and you SHOULD be stopping on those trips anyway.

I love how he's like 'what kind of family will go 300 miles then re-charge only to go 300 miles down the road [implying that an extra 300 miles is a short distance and stopping would be an inconvenience rather than a necessity]'.

Answer: uuuum... a sleepless drug runner, high on meth who's doing a quick run from Tijuana to Vancouver? Dead set...
 
It makes no difference when it arrives as it’ll cost too much for most people anyway. What is more interesting is how car companies are going to satisfy demand for the mass market. With the deadline for getting rid of all petrol and diesel cars by 2030 just a decade away, I still haven’t seen any decent releases to compete on both performance and price.
 
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Well, Apple has a large office/warehouse complex they set up for Project Titan. And they bought a rural test track that was unused by one of the big 3 several years ago. Further, you can build a car from scratch in a suitably-sized and equipped garage (do you not watch any of the car shows on TV?). My brother and I many years ago did a bunch of fiberglass work in our garage in our attempt to turn a VW Beetle into a taller VW Karmann Ghia (approximately). I won't do any glass work ever again, but many things are doable. Load the vehicle onto a truck, drive over to the track at night, and go. There are also several race tracks that would probably allow Apple the privacy they crave for testing. All in all, not an issue.
That's all fine and dandy but the California DMV (and other transportation agencies) will not authorize Apple nor any other company to freely operate/sell/etc. autonomous vehicles on public roads.

The companies need to fully demonstrate that their vehicle technology can operate safely in the wide variety of operational environments and situations that are encountered in the real world.

Apple cannot go from test track to showroom.

The California DMV issues provisional testing permits to any company developing autonomous vehicles designed for public roads. Those companies are required to file regular reports on number of vehicles, miles driven, number of incidents of driver intervention, et cetera ad nauseam. You can download these reports yourself and review them.

Apple has not demonstrated a sufficiently broad and long test drive program in the State of California. By contrast, Alphabet's Waymo and Nuro have both extensive test programs.

Today, the California DMV gave provisional permission to Nuro to conduct commercial deliveries.


Note that this isn't some free for all as many of the slower witted commenters seem to imagine. There are a huge number of restrictions include limited cities of operation, actual streets of operation, time, weather, driving conditions, maximum vehicle speed, etc.

Those who said "it'll never happen" are wrong. It's here. Not widespread, maybe not in your town, but it's no longer a hazy vision of the future.

And if it didn't happen first in Mountain View, CA it would happen somewhere else in the near future. The majority of the autonomous vehicle engineering talent in the USA works in just a couple of Silicon Valley cities. It is unsurprising that Nuro is taking its first steps as a commercial autonomous delivery service there.

If you live in some flyover state this all sounds like science fiction but I seen these prototypes on local roads every day for years. And these vehicles are WAY safer than some snot-nosed teenager or smartphone-distracted anybody behind the wheel, that's for damned sure.
 
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The problem is self-driving in some conditions is relatively easy (eg when it’s on a large, simply structured, well surfaced road, where you just have to stay between clearly painted lines and other traffic), while self-driving in others is very hard (unclear road markings, poor surfaces, complex layouts poorly marked, etc). It’s the same as most software problems really - if there a clear set of instructions to follow then computers do it better (faster and more reliably) than people. If reasoning, and even imagination, are required, people are better, for now.

So, the relevant question becomes - in what kind of driving do those deaths tend to occur? If it’s motorway driving then great, autonomous vehicles will save a lot of lives. If they tend to happen in the more complex environments though, then we may be a long long way from computers being safer than humans overall.

That’s not to say that lives can’t be saved just by letting computers do the bit they’re best at though! I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see motorways/highway/autobahns etc made computer-driver only in the near future (or the introduction of separate roads/lanes for them, with far higher speed limits).
I’m interested to know what you disagree with in this post too @Theyayarealivin - what’s your view on the subject?
 
Nope. Wrong. Autopilot can move off the lane today.
Check 3 minutes 20 seconds into this video:

You can see no hands are on the wheel when it moved off the lane.

Another one:

Autopilot was never disengaged during that maneuver as the blue icon was on the entire time.
Are you kidding? You are referencing to the FSD beta that is not available to the general public. The car in question did not have that version installed.
 
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